The Brief

The Strategy

What if: we could deliver highly-relevant, contextual stories to people’s smartphones, turning the city’s streets into their news homepage?

The Solution

OtherWorld reimagined Google Eddystone and the Physical Web to create magical location-based storytelling experiences, helping people to explore the world around them like never before. For free and without the need for an app.

Bringing Manchester’s streets to life

OtherWorld’s network of beacons were strategically positioned in key hotspots across Manchester city centre, giving maximum coverage on a manageable human scale.

The would tell the stories of a diverse mix of neighbourhoods (via their commuter thoroughfares, public squares, cultural quarters and mixed-use developments) supported by clusters of nearby content partners.

These partners would come in all shapes and sizes, and would have their own set of reasons for getting involved in the pilot. They included Greater Manchester Police, Allied London, BBC, Trinity Mirror, Manchester International Festival, Manchester City Council, NOMA, NHS, People’s History Museum and Manchester Pride.

Reaching people across Manchester with real time news and alerts is essential for Greater Manchester Police. OtherWorld provides us with a new way to engage and we are keen to be involved and see what happens with the experiment.

A revolutionary new storytelling format

OtherWorld is a radically different news ecosystem and storytelling mechanism for our future cities. This centres on providing an accompanying real-world experience to digital news that proved it could open up exciting new storytelling possibilities for newsrooms and engage a new generation of people in local news.

The pilot was supported by Google’s Digital News Initiative (DNI) - a $150m collaboration between Google and news publishers across Europe to support high quality journalism and encourage a more sustainable news ecosystem through technology and innovation.

OtherWorld illustrates the layers of our cities that are often invisible to us, bringing them into focus and allowing a deeper level of exploration into even a familiar city neighborhood.

ArchDaily

Summary

Those brave enough to think differently about news distribution and discovery - beyond websites, apps and social media - will reap the rewards.

OtherWorld offered equal part provocation and inspiration for the sector, showing the exciting new storytelling and civic engagement possibilities presented by beacon technology.

OtherWorld and Like No Other were delighted to be crowned Digital Startup of the Year at the 2018 European Digital Media Awards.